User blog:Fovosi Laet/How to balance Octopath (2)
Time for more specific issues, and there's quite a few to go through, so might as well just start. First off, the scholar class. There's no doubts about it, it's the most powerful early class in the game. Why? Well it's because of the nature of magic in the game. Relative to physical attacks, it never misses, it trades no damage effectiveness, and all the scholar magic targets all foes. And what does it trade off? It does cost SP, and can't be boosted to hit multiple times. But that's it, and those two are hardly tradeoffs. For one, the Theif class can act as an SP supplier. Alfyn can also be an effective SP supplier with plum essences if available. For two, the merchant class grants access to the SP saver skill, cutting down the SP cost significantly. As for hitting multiple times, the later scholar skills hit twice regardless of being boosted or not. As for what to do to balance such a class? Well right off, I can think of one way. The early scholar skills should be boosted to an SP cost of 10, to start, and scale a little higher with BP. The later skills should perhaps retain their double hit, but should be reduced to a cost of 18 SP, with half the damage output per hit, and doesn't scale as well with BP. This would give it the same unboosted alpha damage as the early skills, but would let it retain it's break potential, compensating with a higher SP cost. It also retains the usefulness of the early skills, making them more suitable for high alpha strikes with max boost when the opportunity arises. And while we're talking about magic, the sorcerer class pretty much does everything wrong when it comes to how effective magic should be. Instead of have it be reserved for single hit high alpha strikes, it can dish in 6 hits of elemental damage with Aelfric's Auspices, which is ridiculous enough on it's own. But coupled with the Elemental Break skills, they'll be doing increased base damage. While it may be argued that the astronomical SP cost of each spell offsets their high effectiveness, it isn't enough. When at a point late enough in the game to obtain the class, you would already be at a level where the SP capacities of each traveler are quite high. Plus, you would have access to all the manor of ways to completely compensate for the drawback, such as applying SP saver, Second Wind, using Alfyn's plum essence with a purifying seed for 200 SP, or using a max boost SP donation to drive the sorcerer's SP over max capacity, allowing many spells to be cast without running low. So how to balance the sorcerer class? Well, in much the same way you balancing the Scholar class. Higher alpha damage per strike, fewer strikes. Essentially, sorcerer should be like the warmaster for elemental damage. But speaking of warmaster, that's not safe either. Though for a different reason, which is the strange lack of consistency each move has when it comes to how many opponents each skill targets. Guardian Liondog is random, when it should be akin to Level Slash from the warrior class. Every attack that targets a single foe should, like other moves of it's set, target everyone else. Consistency aside, the class could also use some changes as a whole. The SP cost should reduce to 30 each. The base alpha of each skill shouldn't change, but shouldn't scale as well as they do with BP. As for Winnehild's Battle Cry, it should have a significantly increased SP cost of 100, as it being a physical version of Balogar's Blade that targets everyone, with the same SP cost, is quite overpowered. It's base alpha should also be descreased a little bit. The runelord class as a whole I can't complain about too much, but if I had to make one small adjustment, it would be to make Transfer Rune only affect runelord skills, and give it an equivalent SP cost of every other skill. Like the runes in Balogar's fight as well, the runes could be an exotic way of attacking, being dependent on the user's elemental attack but the recipetent's physical defense, allowing them to be alternatives to traditional magic in some situations. Items are also a big gripe with me. Specifically, healing items and soulstones. The potency of the Healing Grape (M) is so large that you basically don't need a healer until in the later part of chapters. The power of soulstones as killing machines is also quite unwarranted, as they can be used as a crutch with which to overextend. A problem that could sort of be solved if the damage they dealt was just an elemental attack that didn't break any shields, but is for damage only. The main reason as to these problems and more is the functionality of the break system, and how it makes attacks that hit more times preferable almost universally. It's a great system, but one that needs an adequate set of moves that work against it, and Octopath isn't quite there yet. Category:Blog posts